Voicemail is a popular telephone service feature, whether the telephone is standard wired telephone service, wireless, e.g., cellular, telephone service, or even voice over internet protocol (VoIP). When a dialed line does not answer or is busy, a call can be handled by a voicemail system. A voicemail system often plays a recording for a calling party and prompts the calling party to leave a brief message, for example, a spoken message. The message is often recorded and stored until the message is retrieved by a voicemail user.
Statistics suggest that there are close to 100 million cell phone users in the United States. A recent trend in the U.S. includes replacing terrestrial telephone services with cellular telephone services, meaning that a cellular telephone service may be a user's only telephone number. As such, voicemail, an almost standard feature for cellular telephone service, is relied upon by many users to report all missed telephone calls. With the increased reliance upon cellular telephone service has come a corresponding increased reliance upon other cellular telephone features, for example, text messaging, which allows exchange of short strings of text between users without initiating a telephone call. Text messages can be useful for delivering short messages that require no response from the message recipient, for example, “I'm on Flight 1234, arriving at 9:05 PM at Gate 1D.” As reliance upon cellular telephone services and voicemail increases, demand for enhanced voicemail services will likely experience a corresponding increase.